This week, Deke and I solve crimes and unveil mysteries around Photoshop sharpening previews and InDesign’s missing features. And as you can see, we look quite good doing so—thanks to this week’s visualization, courtesy of Matti Alhoniemi’s submisison from our Martini Hour Mashup contest. By the way, we really love Matti’s work on this image, both for its beautiful craftsmanship and because it makes us look hot and smart without our even trying or having to rent costumes. That, my friends, is Photoshoppery put to its intended use.

Here’s what we specifically uncover this week:

Question of the Week (When Drinking Doesn’t Help)

SpartanWarrior, via our celebrity Serbian voiceover magician Dragan, asks about the Sharpening preview in Photoshop. Sometimes the image will look fine in the preview, then go soft again when the sharpening is applied. Why is that?

The effect exists in Photoshop CS3 as well as CS4, so it’s not an Open GL phenomenon. We’ve got our queries into the Adobe elite, they’ve promised to get back to us, and we’ll get to the underlying cause and post it here. In the interim, Deke provides “what to do about it” which involves the magic number of 63.7%.

InDesign Wish List

I’ve has been letting authors, particularly those of a visual bent, write their books directly in InDesign, but I’m hampered by the inability to track edits in InDesign. This means that I either have to make copyeditors work in annotated PDFs (blech) or simply make changes in InDesign behind my poor authors backs. If ID found a way to follow changes that were made, everyone would benefit.

And the Toast of Course

This week, we raise our glass to Adobe for creating the Photoshop Marketplace, a nifty place where anyone with training offerings can bring their wares to the people.

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